Slackware 14.1 is released!

So I thought I’d take this time to instead install SLS 0.98-1 on Qemu.

Now this was the first version of Linux that I actually started to use. The 0.11 stuff was really a pain to install Minix then copy over enough linux to get it working. Instead SLS gave us a more usable distro to be installed on a machine with nothing. And thanks to cd.textfiles.com locating a download set was trivial.

Back in late 1992 I downloaded the zip files from CCUG at a blistering 2400 baud. I remember it took a week to get the A, B and C series. And I had to get a new box of 5 1/4″ High Density diskettes for the install (and another two for my MS-DOS / Windows 3.1 backup).

And just as back then, these zip files are missing files. INSTALL.END is missing from the A & B sets, which confuses the installer. The kernel source is linked to /usr1 which by default doesn’t exist and will cause that part to fail unless you use a virtual terminal (alt+f2) to remove /root/usr/src/linux so the installer will create the path itself after the installation of the A set.

SLS 0.98-1

Once it’s installed, it is pretty bare. vi, more, less, grep, and make are not in the install set, so it’s kind of difficult to move around. Emacs is there if you want it. As ultra primitive as this set is, it does install on an empty machine, which for the time was a big accomplishment.

One cool feature of this installset is that you aren’t tied to Minix’s filesystem, but you can use the new and exciting extfs, or Extended File system.

While the default kernel doesn’t see my emulated ne2000, as at this point the only supported NIC is the Western Digital 8003.

wd8003

As mentioned in we.c it was heavily based on the 386bsd code, although Linux used it’s own TCP/IP implementation, and not importing the Net/1 code.

I would imagine there are patches out there that’ll no doubt add in NE2000 support.

Also included was a very primative dosemu version 0.3, that can sort of run some MS-DOS programs.

DOSEMU 0.3

More complicated stuff like Qbasic will crash it out. Although with a bit of work I did get MS-DOS 5 to boot from it’s “virtual hard disk”. It really is more so amazing it works as well as it does at this point.

My first Linux was sls-0.99 with a patch level I’ve long since forgotten; I contributed an install of it plus installation disks to the Bochs project in 2002. I had a look at it again tonight and found, much to my bemusement that volker was the owner of the disk files. I hadn’t realized that he was behind Soft Landing Systems before he became the distribution organizer of Slackware. Just google “bochs sls” and you’ll find it. Share and Enjoy!